Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Bolts & Bylines: Frankenstein’s Ghost in the Eastland Story

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 157

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 31:03

Send a text

A missing citation can erase a life twice: once from the pages of history, and again from the digital world.  

Highlights: 

RootsTech 2026 recap: Actor and keynote presenter, Marlee Matlin, urged us to honor every life, ensure every story is searchable, and let every family tree reflect humanity’s full spectrum. Her words are simple, but their weight is profound.

These words linger, much like the sting of a lost argument, especially when your daily work unfolds in the shadow of Chicago’s 1915 Eastland disaster, where records remain fractured and too many public profiles mistake speculation for fact.

So what does good genealogical research really require? It means following the genealogical proof standard, using clear source citations, carefully evaluating evidence, and writing that does not just ask readers to simply “trust us.” We put these ideas to the test with the biggest problems in Eastland Disaster research: orphaned photos and biographies posted without sources, drifting online like ghosts who have forgotten their own names. 

Reverse image search can help with the photos. It can also reveal just how fast a face gets mislabeled, copied, and confidently recaptioned across a dozen different websites. Add AI-generated images that look disturbingly authentic, and the stakes get higher by the minute.

At the center of it all is a case study: Tom Chakinis, Greek immigrant, Western Electric employee, Eastland survivor, and accidental victim of what I'm calling a "Franken record" — a nod to Frankenstein, and just as monstrous. This is a profile stitched together from mismatched parts. Paraphrasing, incomplete sourcing, no byline, and borrowed material that nobody thought to credit. It reads like a biography. It functions like a rumor. Even with good intentions, most of us who work in family history have created a Franken-person. Hopefully, we recognize it and apply the corrections.

I tracked this “biography” back to the original source — a *Chicago Tribune* article from August 2, 1979 — and make the case for why restoring the original text, context, and byline isn't a courtesy. It's an obligation. And course correction? Well, that just goes with the territory! 

At its core, genealogical research is an act of respect—for the people we study, for the researchers before us, and for the families still searching for answers. The Eastland disaster took over 800 lives in minutes—and affected countless more. Each one deserves careful representation. Whether we are tracing a Greek immigrant through Chicago’s history or finding a Franken-record in our own work, the way forward is the same: cite our sources, name our sources, and make sure our research can be checked and continued by others. Every correction helps reclaim a story. Every citation connects us across time.

Resources:

Welcome To Flower In The River

Natalie Zett

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and I want to welcome you to episode 157 of Flower in the River podcast. And I hope, all things considered, you're doing okay. So, I just got back from Roots Tech, virtual Roots Tech. Just in case you've never heard of it, Roots Tech is the world's largest genealogical conference that takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah, but it's also online. I think you will be able to access the presentations on YouTube or on their website, and I will give you a link in the show notes. Now I want to share a quote from one of the speakers at Roots Tech. They said, Every person deserves to be remembered. Every life deserves to be searchable. And every family tree deserves to reflect the full, beautiful diversity of humanity. Do you know who said that? No, it wasn't a world-renowned genealogist, although I think she might be studying genealogy at this point. This quote is from Marley Matlin. You know Marley. If you haven't seen Children of a Lesser God, you probably have seen Coda, or you've seen some of her other work. She's quite prolific. Marley Matlin's the only deaf actor so far who has won an Academy Award, and she did that at the age of 21 in her first film, Children of a Lesser God. She's not just an actor, she's an advocate, she's an author, and apparently a family historian. So I will put a link to her keynote in the show notes for you. What she said, this phrase stayed with me throughout the last several days. Every person deserves to be remembered. Every life deserves to be searchable. Now, let me tell you what surprised me about Roots Tech 2026. I fully expected that there would be a number of presentations about AI, and of course there were. What I didn't expect is how many presentations would focus on aspects of the genealogical proof standard, such as source citations, such as evidence, documenting properly. In other words, they were really promoting getting your documentation right, getting it in order. Here's a few session titles that illustrate just that. The first one was called Question Everything, Sharpen Evaluation, Avoid Assumptions, and Clarify Your Writing. The next presentation is called Avoiding Research Pitfalls, and I love the description. Quote, we will show you ways to resolve conflicting information, the importance of original documents, and researching the entire family, adding in friends, neighbors, and associates when necessary. And finally, there's this session, From Discovery to Proof, Crafting a Genealogical Proof Argument. Yes, indeed, the more time you spend in genealogy and family history, the more you are expected to know and the more you expect of yourself. At least that's been true for me. This was a little more of an advanced session, but it was so helpful. And here's a partial description. Genealogists must transform complex research into clear and convincing conclusions. This session focused on writing proof arguments that meet the genealogical proof standard, which is called the GPS, highlighting how to select and organize the strongest evidence. The importance of incorporating social and historical context will also be discussed. Although they might sound a bit on the academic side, and they are, they're not obscure. These are actually foundational concepts that we really have to adhere to and strengthen if we're going to do this type of work. These are the minimum that anyone presenting historical information, genealogical information, owes to the people they're writing about and owes to the families who are counting on them to get it right, and we certainly owe this to future generations who may be researching our work long after we're gone. Now, the audience at Roots Tech, I haven't done a poll, but we're mostly family historians, genealogists, researchers. We're doing this work in our spare time on weekends, etc., out of love and passion for our families, other people's families, and histories. Some indeed are professional genealogists, but whoever we are, we share these traits or characteristics. We are enthusiastic, dedicated people who love learning and love learning from each other. I have to say there's something heartening about this community. We hold ourselves to very high standards. And we also share our journey, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But that's part of it too. That's part of learning. But generally we are individuals doing this work. We're not institutions. And along those lines, here's a question. Do organizations always hold themselves to those same high standards? Speaking for myself, I would think that any organization that's devoted to a particular history or topic would meet those standards, if not surpass them. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that the folks that I've worked with at places like the Newberry, Chicago History Museum, University of Illinois, and the Chicago Public Library, I hope I'm not leaving anybody out, but those are the ones that come to mind, and they are knowledgeable, and they are so generous and kind, and I so appreciate them. Well, as I've learned, not every person and every organization operates in this fashion. I am not going to recap last week's podcast, but I'll give you a summary. But I responded to a listener's request to analyze an online profile of an Eastland victim. This person is one of their distant relatives. First thing I noticed this profile had no source citation for either the bio or the photo. Well, I checked online and I was able to come up with some biographical information for this person. But the most challenging aspect was not the biography, it was the photo. First of all, the photo had no identifying information, no name, no date, location, and there was no mention of who donated this photo in the first place. You know it came from someone's family. So I tried to find the image elsewhere online and I found it. But each search result had a different name attached to it. And because that alleged original photo had no identifying information, it's up for grabs. These types of photos with no identification are sometimes called orphaned photos. And there also was an AI photo, but the issue with that one is that it looked real. And a lot of this mess and confusion could have been mitigated somewhat if the so-called original photo had proper source citation provenance and all the rest, but it didn't. One thing I've learned by doing this work is that locating original documentation for all of these people who were involved in the Eastland disaster, it's not that it's easy, it's just that it is possible. The photographs, however, present a much different type of challenge, and I'm only now getting into what that all means. What I thought might be an interesting experiment is to do a random sample. In other words, just pick out somebody who was associated with the Eastland disaster who has some sort of biography available online and analyze it. This is about investigating the practices. I'm not talking about any particular platform. As I look at these profiles, I'm evaluating what is there and what is missing and what needs to be restored. For this first experiment, I wanted to select a profile that had a photo to make it extra challenging. So we'll start with the image. This appeared to be a studio photograph of a young man taken probably in the early 1900s. The profile page on this website had the person's name. However, the photograph had no identifying information, no name, no date, no indication as to where the photo came from. How would you and I know that this is the person that they claimed it was? Answer We wouldn't know that. We have to question everything. We can't take the word of a person or an organization unless they provide the evidence, unless they provide the proof for what they are claiming. I ran this image through several online reverse image search tools like Google Images and Tin Eye. This particular photo didn't show up anywhere, but I did get literally hundreds of similar results. In summary, our original photo has become separated from its historical context. For researchers, this is a red flag. This is a cause for concern. However, if there is a silver lining in all of this, when I searched on the name of the person, I was able to find a couple of newspaper articles that had photos of him, and I'll talk about that later. I had a most visceral reaction to the narrative, and I think that comes from being a writer myself, as well as working as an editor. When I looked at that narrative, the beginning of it seemed to be a paraphrase of something or other, where the end of it seemed to be quotes from a newspaper article. So it wasn't smooth, it actually felt jittery for lack of a better word. And the source citation at the bottom of the page wasn't written in standard format. It simply stated that the material came from the Chicago Tribune. And that put the burden on the reader to try to figure out the month, date, and year this article was published, and that made it difficult to verify. And that leads us into the Frankenstein problem in genealogy, historical research, and research in general. The subtitle for this one could be How Stitched Together Sources Create Historical Monsters. Back in 1931, director James Whale brought to the screen what would become one of the most iconic images in all of cinema. The movie Frankenstein was based on the novel Frankenstein, which was written by Mary Shelley when she was 18 years old, and it was published in 1818 when she was twenty one. The story is about a creature assembled from mismatched pieces of the dead, stitched together on the laboratory table of a man who believed he could improve on nature. Sound familiar? Yes. Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster, flat topped head, neck bolts, that lurching walk. If you haven't seen it, please put it on your list and make sure to check it out. It's actually very emotional and sympathetic toward the creature because, after all, the creature did not ask to be made. And it also talks about hubris. It talks about arrogance and the dangers of quote unquote playing God. Now, how does all of this relate to genealogy and historical research? Well, I'm going to hold Krista Cowen, the barefoot genealogist, responsible for this. I think it was in one of her training videos where Krista coined a term that has stayed with me ever since. She warned us when we're doing our genealogy to not create Franken people. A Franken person is what happens when a researcher, often working with the best of intentions, accidentally merges two or more different individuals into one record. For example, let's say you have two guys and they're both named John Smith. They were born in the same city on the same date and the same year. You put all of these records together, and suddenly one person is living two or more lives that they actually never lived. That's one simple example of a Franken person. But today we're going to talk about a variation of the Franken person, and I call this the Franken Record. And I see this quite a bit as I continue to research the history of the people of the Eastland disaster. But let's bring this back to the person I just introduced you to briefly, Tom Chikinis. Tom was his American name, but he was a Greek immigrant and his given name was Athanasios A T H A N S I O S. His original name was also left out of this online profile. At first glance we can see that there is indeed some sort of biography for Tom Chickinis. It tells a story. Pause for a second. What you may not realize is that what you're reading is not a primary source. Rather, it's a patchwork stitched together from other sources. Sources that are not fully cited, or sources that may have been paraphrased, but not credited. As I mentioned, the only so-called source citation they had was Chicago Tribune with no details, no date, no URL. However, I located the original article. The original article is quite different from the one that I saw on this platform. So this platform did not print the original article with attribution. Instead, the article was reworked into this Franken article, Franken record. And what appears to have happened is that they paraphrased part of the original article and then quoted bits and pieces of this source material. So in summary, don't take anything at face value and try to get to the primary source or the original source. Why should you care? Chain of custody simply means the documented path something has taken from the moment it was created to where it is now and who handled it along the way. Having this information helps you to evaluate what it is exactly that you are looking at. It also helps you to determine fact from fiction. Okay, so I want to share with you the original article that I found about the Eastland disaster survivor, Tom Chakinus. It is from the Chicago Tribune. The date is August 2, 1979. Headline He recalls Eastland tragedy fatal to 812. Author Diane Amon A M A N Life has been good to Tom Chekinis. After fleeing starvation in Greece in 1911, he immigrated to Chicago where he married, reared four children, and operated two restaurants. Yet he's lucky he lived to see his 85th birthday. Sixty-four years ago, Chekinus, a 21-year-old factory worker, boarded the steamer Eastland in the Chicago River at Clark Street. Minutes later, the boat rolled over on one side and 812 persons were killed. Chiquina survived and he recalls the disaster vividly. He gestures, laughs, and lapses into snatches of Greek as he tells the story he's repeated so often. Nearly 2,000 Western Electric Hawthorne plant employees and their families boarded the steamer that day in 1915, bound for a day-long company picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. As they waited for the boat to leave, they sang and nibbled at their picnic lunches, Shakinas said. As they sat in chairs on the top deck, his friend, Ted Hollis, pointed to the life preservers above them and told Shakinis, grab onto these in case of an accident. Shakinis thought little of the comment, for he'd sailed from Greece a few years before. Before with no mishap. It mattered little, for when the boat went over, there was no time to grab at anything. It was later determined that so many passengers had mast on one side, their weight caused the steamer to roll over. The poor people who were sitting on the other side of the boat slid like whoosh, Shakinas said, making a downhill motion with his hand. Shakinas, who could not swim, slid forward the staircase leading to the lower deck and lunged for the railing. He saw hundreds of bodies below him, bodies of people who had been on the lower deck. I was lucky all the people was under me, he said. I remember I was standing on somebody's shoulder, so I didn't drown. He later was pulled onto the dock by a fireman. Ted Hollis was not so lucky. He was swept away as soon as the boat turned over. Most survivors returned to work immediately. Chekinas said, the people that survived didn't want to hear anything more about it. You try to forget, but Chekinas never really forgot. Years later, he forbade his children from going near the water. He never boarded a boat again. End of article. And the other delightful thing about this article is that there are four photos of Tom as he tells his story. And I will make sure to include those photos in the 90-second promotional video that I will make for this episode. I'm glad that I was able to locate the original article and share that with you. Also, there's another thing that the article has that the cobble together Franken record, Franken article does not have, and that is the byline. I'll talk about that. Before we continue, there's one more point of interest I want to share with you. You remember the name of Tom's friend, Theodore Hollis, Ted Hollis. Back on April 20th, 2024, so that's two years ago, I published a podcast episode called Irish Roots and Greek Tides, More Eastland Stories. In that episode, I shared the story of Theodore Hollis. I wasn't able to find much about him. He was a recent Greek immigrant. He was living with his brother during that time. And obviously, he also knew Tom Chickenus. And I wish I would have known of that connection back when I was doing Ted's bio. Locating Tom Chekinis's profile connected him and Theodore, and they belonged together. The other great thing about finding this original article is that I got to see who the writer was. Why her byline was removed in this later version of this article that I found online? Well, that's anybody's guess, but that is not standard practice to do this. However, you should know that I have seen this quite a bit when it comes to biographies of people of the Eastland disaster, and I do my best to find the original article, but also to give the author credit if their byline is included. So I'm a journalist and have written for a number of newspapers, so I was curious about this writer. Her name is Diane Amon, and I wondered what happened to her. Did she continue as a journalist? Did she keep writing for the Chicago Tribune? Did she write a book? Let me tell you what I found. She's now known as Professor Diane Marie Amon. She's located in the United Kingdom. She's a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science Law School. She is also Regent's Professor Emerita and the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law Emerita at the University of Georgia School of Law, where between 2011 and 2025 she taught courses such as constitutional law, public international law, laws of war, human rights, and transnational and international criminal law, and served as an associate dean and faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center. And it goes on and on. I would say Professor Amon has done very well. And I did reach out to her. She may not remember even doing this interview in this article, but I wanted to thank her for being part of the Eastland story as the person who interviewed Tom Chicanis and let her know that I restored this article with proper attribution, and I also restored her byline. And for me, it's not just an ethical thing to restore someone's byline to an article. Of course it is, and that should never be removed. But it's equally important to say thank you because if Diane hadn't done that piece of writing, we wouldn't have this information. And yes, it was her job, and she did her job very well. Because I have done so many profiles myself throughout the years as a journalist in Minneapolis, St. Paul, I think I can usually tell when a writer cares about their subject, and I wanted to thank her for caring about Tom. I will stop here for today. Although this episode was brief, I think its implications are vast. I opened with a powerful reminder from Marley Matlin that every person deserves to be remembered. Every life deserves to be searchable, and every family tree deserves to reflect the full, beautiful diversity of humanity. This isn't just a sentiment. For me, it's a direct mandate for the history of the Eastland disaster. Currently, that history is fragmented. Way too many biographies are missing, and even when they exist, they are often stripped of their sources and bylines, leaving us with a cobbled together account that sometimes lacks life. My task is to restore these narratives and locate the original sources that ground them in truth, and to not intentionally make a Franken record or a Franken story. So next week we will continue this forensic work. I will be sharing a mix of stories, some that have never been told in conjunction with the Eastland disaster since their original publication, and others that simply need a lot of source citation help to stand on their own. These individuals, they were just like you and me once upon a time. They walked the earth, they built families, they lived lives that were cut short. They are gone, but they must never be forgotten. So take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Stay safe, and I will talk with you next week. Goodbye for now. Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerinthher.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money, and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of nineteen fifteen. Goodbye for now.

Head Shot

Natalie Zett

Host